If you missed those screens or want to revise your choices, the same options are many levels down in the Office menus.

Connected Services and your privacy

All these cloud connections send information to Microsoft. The company groups these services into ‘download’ and ‘analyze’ customer data but the reality is that all the ‘Connected Experiences’ send some of your personal or business data to Microsoft. Any of that data can be used by Microsoft or shared with other agencies without notice or explicit consent.

They might seem like minor details, but any privacy expert will tell you that those little bits of info can be combined into a frighteningly complete profile of a person or business.

Only two choices

Microsoft only gives customers two choices when it comes to what’s sent to the company.

The ‘Connected Experiences‘ can only be turned on/off according to the two broad and somewhat misleading groupings. Go to File | Options | Trust Center | Privacy Options | Privacy Settings.

Scroll down to see the cloud services / connected experiences choices.

Analyze content

Other Office 365 cloud services more obviously need document content to work like Dictation

Excel’s Insights gets your spreadsheet data to provide an analysis.

PowerPoint’s Designer takes text and images from a slide to suggest alternative designs.

Download online content

Despite the wording, these ‘download’ services are not a one-way street. Some private information is sent to Microsoft before every request, naturally. For example, words from your document go to Microsoft for the thesaurus, Smart Lookup or Researcher.

The two speech features, ‘Read Aloud’ and ‘Dictate’ send every word to Microsoft.

Any search for online media can be tracked.

Most troubling is Excel’s Stock Data type. It’s a great feature but every time you use it, you’re sending a list of the stocks, funds and indexes you’re following.